The Department of Homeland Security has forked over hundreds of thousands of dollars during the government shutdown to push video ads encouraging unauthorized immigrants to self-deport, according to an analysis of Meta, Google and TV advertisements.
DHS spent an estimated $100,000 to specifically target Instagram and Facebook users interested in Latin music, soccer and Mexican cuisine with one such video.
“If you’re an illegal alien, this runway is your future because you’re headed home,” Noem says in the ad. “If you don’t, you will be caught, fined, detained and forcefully removed. Under President Trump’s strong leadership, we follow the law, and our border is secure.”
DHS spent $297,100 — and counting — on YouTube ads in the U.S. so far in October, according to Google’s ad transparency center. And on TV, the agency’s self-deportation ads have been played at least 80 times since Oct. 6, including during international soccer games and on Univision programs in targeted U.S. cities — as well as ads that played Monday during “Good Morning America” in New York City and an Oct. 7 national ad placement during “Fox & Friends.” The value of those 80 ad placements sits at about $360,000, according to cost-per-spot estimates generated by the media-monitoring service TVEyes.
The ad buys offer some insight into what DHS considers essential spending while many federal government services are shuttered and as many federal workers go without pay. DHS is making a massive push to tout its successes, encourage more immigrants to leave the U.S. and discourage immigrants from crossing illegally — and it’s cost taxpayers at least $51 million, according to Axios, making it this year’s most expensive political ad campaign. The shutdown hasn’t stopped it.
These ads spawned out of fast-tracked ad contracts that caught flack from government watchdog groups, who objected to the department’s plans to shell out $200 million over two years to Republican-linked political firms. Since, the cost of the contracts have since more than doubled, according to an Accountable.US investigation — those contracts were amended to cost taxpayers $440 million by 2027.
Since the shutdown, DHS has actually increased its spending on pushing its self-deportation YouTube ads, according to Google’s ad transparency center. For the month of September, DHS spent over $279,000 to run YouTube ads before pausing ad buys Sept. 22. That figure has already been eclipsed by the department’s ad spending since the agency began running them again on Oct. 5.
Of the nearly $300,000 that DHS has spent to run these video ads on YouTube alone, about 28% of that was spent to target users in California, and 16% of that was spent targeting users in Texas.
DHS did not respond to a request for comment. But because the ads promote the Customs and Border Protection’s self-deportation app, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told Axios that it “isn’t a political ad — this is a public service announcement urging illegal aliens to leave.”
The top Democrats in both chambers’ homeland security committees are calling the necessity of the ad spending into question.
“It is abhorrent that DHS is spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on vanity ads for Kristi Noem to get Donald Trump’s affection and attention,” Rep. Bennie Thompson said in a statement. “The fact that DHS is still spending money running these ads during the Trump shutdown is adding insult to injury — there is nothing mission critical about them.”
Ranking member Gary Peters called the videos “political ads.”
“DHS should be focused on its many missions to protect our national security and supporting its workforce, not running political ads or purchasing luxury jets amid a government shutdown,” Peters said in a statement to NOTUS.
Thompson, alongside the late Rep. Gerry Connolly, sent a letter to Noem in March demanding more information about how the ads were created and how its vendor contracts were awarded, calling the ads an “apparent blatant misuse of American tax dollars.”
Noem responded with a brief letter in May that provided none of the details that the lawmakers requested.
“The Department followed all proper procedures in awarding this targeted national and international campaign,” Noem wrote to Thompson. “The ‘Stronger Borders, Stronger America’ ad campaign contributes to the Trump Administration’s quick success in creating the most secure border in American history.”
NBC News reported last month that the app these ads are promoting, the CBP Home app, has actually seen a stark drop in downloads since DHS converted it from an app that helped asylum seekers into a self-deportation app — and that people attempting to use it say it’s confusing and difficult. Immigrants attempting to leave using the app told ProPublica this month that they felt stranded and weren’t given the benefits that DHS’s ads promised.
Noem has featured herself prominently across DHS’s video ads. Recently, the department pushed out what critics say is a legally questionable message targeting passengers traveling through delay-riddled airports, where Noem says that “Democrats in Congress refuse to fund the federal government.” Some airports have refused to play the video, and Democratic senators are calling for an investigation into how DHS paid to produce the ad during the shutdown.
“This is an ongoing abuse by the Trump administration of spending government resources for partisan purposes,” Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist with Public Citizen, wrote in a statement to NOTUS. “This abuse has gone beyond normal partisan squabbles into spending taxpayer dollars for sheer partisan gain. It is long past time for the administration to realize American government is not one-party rule.”